Although the queen's gambit is not among his favorite openings, world chess champion Magnus Carlsen loves the hit Netflix series "because it reflects the details of the sport very well, it's very well acted and it shows that women can play chess on the same level as a man". The Queen's Gambit has also helped the business holding company Play Magnus, created by the so-called Mozart of the board, to skyrocket its valuation. Play Magnus is listed on the Norwegian Stock Exchange and is the head of the largest group related to the world of chess.

And it is that this sport is living a golden age. The Queen's Gambit has had 70 million viewers - the most watched miniseries in history - and has made Internet games so fashionable that chess is on its way to becoming a mass sport. It could even become an Olympic modality at the 2024 Paris Games.

Chess has not been so popular since the seventies, when the American Bobby Fischer faced the Soviet Boris Spassky in the duel of the century. The Internet has democratized a sport that was considered elitist, and now millions of people play daily on the Internet as if it were a video game. There are plenty of analysts annotating games on Twitch -the channel for gamers-, YouTube, Chess.com and Chess24.com, a platform integrated into the business empire of Magnus Carlsen.

The Norwegian player, one of the best in history, captures all the eyes of the fans these days because from Friday, November 26, he defends his title of world champion at the Universal Expo in Dubai against the Russian Ian Niepómniachi to the best of 14 games and two million euros in prizes, 60% for the winner. Russian President Vladimir Putin has made this confrontation a reason of state and has said that recovering the scepter of world chess for his country is a priority. It has been 15 years since a Russian player, Vladimir Kramnik, lost the title to Indian Viswanathan Anand. Carlsen began his reign in 2013 by beating Anand and becoming the second youngest world champion in history behind the great Gari Kasparov, considered the best chess player of all time and who held world number one for 20 consecutive years. , from 1985 to 2005.

The confrontation between Carlsen and Niepómniachi, both 31 years old, looks very close, and it will surely be more exciting than the previous two world championships, which were soporific with most games ending in draws. Carlsen then played very conservatively to force draws with Kariakin and Caruana. He beat both of them on tiebreaks because Carlsen was far superior to them in rapid games. On this occasion, the Russian Niepómniachi is as good or better than Carlsen in the rapids, so the Norwegian will try not to reach the jump-off.

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Win or lose, this showdown will further boost Magnus Carlsen's business, valued at €150 million. It was his parents -Henrik and Sigrun- who laid the foundations of this small empire by creating the Magnus Chess heritage company to manage their profits when the genius of the board was 16 years old and already pointing ways. Three years later he would become world number one.

Magnus Chess is the main shareholder of Play Magnus, which was born as an application that allowed users to imitate Carlsen's style of play, but which is now the head of the group. Play Magnus -with 250 employees, 5 million users and a value of 150 million euros- is the only chess company listed on the Stock Exchange. It jumped to the parquet on October 8, 2020.

Play Magnus has been expanding through acquisitions and today has a dozen subsidiaries that include several websites to play chess online -such as Chess24.com-, platforms for teaching this sport through courses and videos -Chessable, CoChess and jChess.net- and publishers that are dedicated to the publication of both print and digital chess books, such as the prestigious New in Chess.

The group's growth is the result of Magnus Carlsen's obsession with making chess more and more popular and accessible to everyone. In this sense, the Norwegian player has promoted the Champions Chess Tour, an online chess competition aimed at high-level professional players and which aims to become a benchmark in this sport such as the Champions for football, Formula 1 for racing or the PGA for golf.

For this project, Carlsen has enlisted the support of several sponsoring companies - Mastercard, Julius Baer, ​​Unibet, Meltwater and FTX - and the best players in the world, who highly appreciate the Norwegian. And it is that far from the madness of other historical chess players, Carlsen surprises because both his physical appearance and his mood give off a pleasant naturalness. He is modest and very shy, and unlike other geniuses he gets along with his rivals and is not at all eccentric. And that his IQ is 186, just one point less than Albert Einstein's. A normal person has a quotient between 110 and 119, and from 130 he is considered gifted.

Carlsen's character has nothing to do with that of Anya Taylor-Joy, the protagonist of Lady's Gambit, who has to deal with her addictions to pills and liquor, although both agree on her love for this wonderful sport. As the great Alekhine said: "Once upon a time men should have been demigods, otherwise they would not have invented chess."